Thursday, August 12, 2004

Babel Fish Translation

Babel Fish Translations - those automated online translations of foreign language texts or webpages - are just good enough to get you into trouble.

For example - and you're gonna like this one - Annette was reviewing an online version of some Christian book...the guy who translated it obviously leaned heavily on an automatic translator because wherever the name "Holy Spirit" showed up it had been translated into Spanish as "Holy Liquor" (spirits = liquor... see the problem!?) Just imagine when John the Baptist baptized Jesus and the holy liquor decended on him.... or when the disciples were filled with the holy liquor during Pentacost.

If you'd like to see a personal example of bad BabelFishing results, click on the image above (or here) to see how our Spanish language youth leaders website was parsed.

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